Somewhere, I saw a question as to why Laura Ingalls decided to teach the Wilkins School at $30/month minus $2/week for room and board instead of the Perry School (again) for $25/month while boarding at home for free. Anyone can see that Laura would come out three whole dollars per month ahead if she had taken the Perry School. So what was up with that?
In real life, the De Smet township school board had been having financial trouble, so they voted to change the length of the third term in 1884 from three months to two months – in order to use money normally paid out to teachers to pay to creditors who were threatening to sue. When Laura taught the Perry School in 1884, her contract (on display in Mansfield) reflected this change. She was hired to teach for a term of two months at $25/month.
By the next year, the schools were doing better, so the Wilkin School held a three month third term. In real life, Laura was paid $25/month to teach the Wilkin School; again, her contract is on display in Mansfield. And also in real life, the school board voted to close the Perry School for a year after Laura’s term there as teacher, because there weren’t enough students to justify keeping it open.
What Laura probably remembered was that she made more teaching the Wilkin School than the Perry School, which was correct. The mistake in the fictional math simply wasn’t caught by Laura, Rose, or anyone else who might have read These Happy Golden Years prior to publication.
